I’m fed up with journalists who are either ignorant or unwilling to learn about cryptocurrency holding forth on its perceived weaknesses. However, there isn’t enough time in the day to rebut all of their nonsense, so I have to be selective. Here, I’m going to expose the Washington Post/Wonkblog piece for the nonsensical ramble that it is.

I don't think that any of us can deny that it is mainly whales pushing the price up and pushing it down.

This really has nothing to do with typical sentiment of the average user or some sort of good or bad news. Other than the fact that the whales may believe that the market will not fight them in one move or another as they swing things back and forth.

The key being, which way do these whales want the price to go? Well they are certainly not in bitcoin because they read the white paper and were inspired. They have balance sheets that need big profits.

We will see. I really do wish Wall Street would stay out of bitcoin. Bitcoin can grow without it, and will likely be around long after it.

Isn't a rule of BTC price movement (or any market in that regard) that the whales will attempt to push the price in the direction of least resistance? As lay persons, it is not always easy for us to assess, and probably even for whales they might perform a test pump or dump, and hope that others will follow that particular direction.

I don't think that any of us can deny that it is mainly whales pushing the price up and pushing it down.

This really has nothing to do with typical sentiment of the average user or some sort of good or bad news. Other than the fact that the whales may believe that the market will not fight them in one move or another as they swing things back and forth.

The key being, which way do these whales want the price to go? Well they are certainly not in bitcoin because they read the white paper and were inspired. They have balance sheets that need big profits.

We will see. I really do wish Wall Street would stay out of bitcoin. Bitcoin can grow without it, and will likely be around long after it.

Isn't a rule of BTC price movement (or any market in that regard) that the whales will attempt to push the price in the direction of least resistance? As lay persons, it is not always easy for us to assess, and probably even for whales they might perform a test pump or dump, and hope that others will follow that particular direction.

and the fuckers jumping right up on it (advice of shorting BTC right now) ...... just want BTC to punch them all in the face as in right now .....

Analysis by some Wall Street analyst that was on "awesome investor list" back in 2014.

If this guy is such a great investor, did he see the bitcoin price rise coming in 2014 when he was at the top of his game? Was he advising people with his analysis to buy bitcoin?

If not this guy's outlook on the future is shit.

Remember the end of 2014, there were all kinds of folks coming out of the wood work advising how to "make a killing" shorting bitcoin, and that was towards the end of the period in which shorting was really profitable. Sure you could have had some periods of "o.k." performance to short Bitcoin between late 2014 and 2017; however, as you suggested, you would have done much better just attempting to accumulate as much BTC as you could and would not have even needed to use leverage in order to make a killing buying all the way until about October 2017.. hahahahaha

I'm mostly in ethereum so I may be fucked. I guess I don't really consider coins like eth and monero to be alts. I know technically anything that isn't bitcoin is an alt, but when I hear altcoins I automatically think of shitcoins with no future.

d'oh!

Maybe it depends on how you define future?

Yeah, ETH has been used to promulgate a lot of other shit coins. That's its main use case, and accordingly that gives ETH some kind of future - perhaps 5 years? Perhaps some other quantity of time, but it is not built to last, such as bitcoin. From what I understand Monero may have some more longer term viable fundamentals than ETH, and in that regard, could serve as a kind of parallel investment channel to bitcoin, but I don't really see why Bitcoin would not largely absorb any of Monero's supposed advantageous features, that is if those supposed advantageous features prove to be advantageous?

I'm thinking about your assessment of the real world situation and the prevalence of "no coiners."

Bitcoin continues to have such low adoption (quite less than 1% world wide, and assumingly less than 10% in the even most crypto friendly of quasi-real world locations), that I would be surprised if any wedding had any kind of meaningful number of bitcoin HODLers. Covertly, there could be a few bitcoin HODLers in your presence.

I'm thinking about your assessment of the real world situation and the prevalence of "no coiners."

Bitcoin continues to have such low adoption (quite less than 1% world wide, and assumingly less than 10% in the even most crypto friendly of quasi-real world locations), that I would be surprised if any wedding had any kind of meaningful number of bitcoin HODLers. Covertly, there could be a few bitcoin HODLers in your presence.

... if bitcoin really takes off I can see lots of get-rich-quick imitators coming on the scene: gitcoin, nitcoin, witcoin, titcoin, shitcoin... Some of them are sure to attract users with promises like "Why use bitcoin, where you can only generate 50 bitcoins every few months? Use shitcoin instead, and you'll get 51 shitcoins every 2 minutes".

Of course the cheap imitators will disappear as quickly as those 1990s "internet currencies" like flooz and beenz, but lots of people will get burned along the way.

The objective of this thread is to keep track of the death of altcoins. My plan is to study how and why they die. I'll be updating the entries, and posting more complete notes next to each of these as I investigate and learn things. ...

If someone finds an efficiency or security protocol innovation I think it would be integrated into bitcoin. Almost anything can be integrated, worst case by importing bitcoins utxo into a v2 protocol and new network. This is why I don't think feature coins have a long term value.[ 4 Jul 2018 ]

I often notice the following pattern in the Bitcoin price: it's quite stable for hours to days, moving sideways, then suddenly it drops or shoots up in a more or less straight line. After that, it continues moving sideways.How can that be? I can only think its being manipulated by some whale(s) keepingt he price stable until they need change. If there's a different explanation, I'd like to hear it.

Yep, quite distinctive pattern. It seems to be happening in this year's bear market mostly, I didn't notice it showing before.

Some sell and buy a lot more than others. Even when they use multiple exchanges, it does move the price quite a bit. Exchanges (thankfully) also run 24/7 but at some times of the day or days of the week the liquidity is less than ideal. Manipulation depend on what rules you follow. I do reasonably thrust (but never used) exchanges, as in not allowing buy orders without pony up the fiat and not allowing sell orders without having the coins, and also executing order books in the order of bid/ask price.

Also, there is always a bigger fish, so trying to manipulate the price when you think you are big may backfire when it turns out you are not.

If this is normal market behavior caused by bigger buys and sells, then this same behavior should be seen on other markets like stock markets or forex, right? Are there similar patterns visible? I am just asking genuine question, as I did not examine other assets' markets...

If this is normal market behavior caused by bigger buys and sells, then this same behavior should be seen on other markets like stock markets or forex, right? Are there similar patterns visible? I am just asking genuine question, as I did not examine other assets' markets...

According to the Bitmain pre-IPO investor deck, they sold most of their #Bitcoin for #Bcash. At $900/BCH, they've bled half a billion in the last 3 months. If Bitcoin Core devs didn't disclose the Bcash vulnerability, it could've wiped a billion dollars off their balance sheets.